Tuesday, 26 November 2013

Where's the Beef?

I'm a social media luddite. For years I've resisted Facebook and Twitter and all of the other Google+ like offers. I do have opinions, like to share them with others, and this blog has satisfied that, and the fact that people actually read it is even better. Two weeks ago, partially for work reasons, and definitely out of curiosity, I joined Twitter, and it's been very interesting. I'm careful about who I'm following (basically all journalists I respect), and I've only "tweeted" a couple of times and just to re tweet other material. Still too insecure to get in on the tweeting action, but looking for an opportunity. Can I say something meaningful in 140 characters? Not really my style.

What I have found interesting is that it's like being back in a newsroom, with all of the BS and opinions you'll hear behind the scenes, very different from the columns or reports that get written, edited, and presented to the public at the end of the day. And when you get obviously controversial stuff like the Senate scandal, or Ford, the opinions run hard. You can see journalists egging each other on. disagreeing, arguing. Does it make the journalism better, the public better informed? I think it does.

There's incredible sharing of information which I think is a good thing. Journalists like nothing better than to break a story, have an "exclusive", but that takes either very good luck, or lots of time, and most journalists have neither these days. (And don't forget the trouble the British tabloids got into demanding exclusives from their reporters.) On Twitter some of the highest profile and smartest journalists in the country haggle through the day over what's new, what matters. There are definitely egos at work, people trying to push readers to their columns or reports, and yes journalism is a business too.

I'd still like CTV's Robert Fife to tell us where he got the story about Nigel Wright and the $90 thousand dollar Duffy cheque. I'm really interested in what motivated the source. Is it another Christopher Montgomery trying to do the right thing, or a foe of Harper, or Mike Duffy blabbing away to pals over a drink, all of the above?

So I'm still more comfortable with 144 words, (and I don't have a smart phone) but Twitter has been stimulating (and it must be a nightmare for anyone in politics or business trying to control a message, stuff is out there in a heartbeat).

Back to basics. I have written a few times about the possibilities of grass-fed beef raised here on PEI. PEI has excellent forage, and there appears to be growing demand for non-feedlot beef. I've read a couple of good pieces on the subject, one looking at the pluses and the minuses (always like that, but difficult to do in 144 characters). I like the first one because it explains the important role forage (hay essentially) can play in preventing soil erosion and sucking up carbon. There have been moments when carbon trading has been proposed (know it's a bad word right now) that would actually have paid farmers to keep fields in forage as a carbon sink.

Why we don't eat beef for Thanksgiving

Should we only eat meat when it's in season?

by Maddie Oatman

Michael Klein

It's
almost time to bid farewell to tomatoes. The stiff, tasteless orbs
found in even California supermarkets come winter don't do the fruit
justice, so I'll gorge myself now and then settle in for eight months of
canned goods. But it's not just produce that's best at a seasonal peak:
Farm animals also respond to temperature and light. In fact, some food
experts believe that we should wait for the right season to eat fresh
meat.
This isn't exactly a new idea. Cultures throughout history have
slaughtered animals at certain times of year, and many of our
traditional holiday meals—think Thanksgiving turkey and Easter ham—came
from this practice. Steak also was once an autumn delicacy: After the
first frost, ranchers would flood the market with steers fattened on
summer's pastures. But that changed after World War II, when
farmers—buoyed by a large new trove of government-subsidized corn and
soy—found profit in confining cattle and selling meat year-round, and
most turned to "finishing"
cattle on grain, breaking beef's tie to grass growth cycles. The tender
meat produced this way made "corn-fed" a compliment, but by now the
downsides have also become apparent: Today upwards of 97 percent of US beef is grain-fed, and livestock consume more than 50 percent of
the corn produced in the United States, requiring a system of massive
monoculture, heavy pesticide applications, and overtilled soils. On the
other hand, well-managed permanent pasture, where grasses are dense and
root systems maintained, can improve the soil, prevent erosion, and sequester carbon.
So lately, grass-fed meat has been enjoying a renaissance among both foodies and ranchers, with everyone from Whole Foods to fast-food chain Elevation Burger
peddling pastured beef and lamb. But there's a catch: In order to sell
their product all year long, farmers finish their grass-fed animals with
hay and dry forage in the winter months. Those stored feeds are lower
in fatty acids and precursors for antioxidants such as omega-3s—which
make grass-fed beef healthier in the first place, says Cynthia Daley, an
agriculture professor at California State University-Chico. "To
optimize these antioxidants," she says, "cattle need to be finished off
grass."
That's why Bill Niman, the founder and former CEO of Niman Ranch,
sells his pasture-finished Black Angus beef only from early summer to
fall—to take advantage of prime Northern California grazing time, which
begins in spring. (The timing would be different in other climates; in
Vermont, where grass remains lush through the summer, the meat would be
best later.) Chefs at premier restaurants—like California's Chez Panisse
and New York's Blue Hill—say Niman's rich steaks are worth the wait.
Even nongrazing animals traditionally were prepared at particular
times: Farmers slaughtered hogs in the fall, after the barrows had
gorged on acorns. Sausages
were made when workers were finished in the fields and had time to help
in the packing houses. Hams were cured all winter and ready in time for
Easter. Meat birds also have a prime season: Turkeys that are allowed
to forage outdoors feast on abundant grass and bugs in the summer.
Shorter days in the fall affect their hormones, causing them to retain
more fat in anticipation of winter. "There's a reason why turkey was the
Thanksgiving bird," says Kansas heritage turkey farmer Frank Reese.
"That's when it was ready."
But buying seasonal meat at its peak isn't cheap. Niman's ribeyes,
sold as BN Beef, ring in at $21.99 a pound at one San Francisco market,
compared to around $12.50 per pound for the average boneless ribeye.
Frank Reese's heritage turkeys cost around $9.50 a pound; supermarket
turkeys go for $1.68 per pound. "Grass-fed costs a lot more because it
costs the rancher a lot more to make it," says University of
California-Davis livestock specialist Jim Oltjen. And the consolidation
of slaughterhouses hasn't made it easier for ranchers trying to buck the
system: A lot of them would prefer to process meat seasonally, but
industrial abattoirs run year-round, and they don't let ranchers choose
when to bring their animals in. One recent University of California study
found that small-scale beef ranchers in California's Mendocino County
were "hampered by significant scheduling problems" at the few
USDA-certified slaughterhouses in the area.
Consumer demand could help tip the scales in favor of these small
farmers. "We started with a very small group of people who cared about
the seasonality of tomatoes, and that group has grown," says Maisie
Greenawalt, a strategist for a large sustainable-food-focused catering
company. Seasonal seafood is gaining popularity too, she says—eating
wild salmon only during the summer run, for example. "There's a possibility for meat to follow that same pattern."
And what happens in February when you're hankering for a burger? "The
great thing about meat is you can freeze it," Oltjen says. "It does
fine." So if you're one of the growing number of omnivores adding
pasture-raised meat to your diet, it might be time to invest in a chest
freezer—or kiss that cheeseburger goodbye for a few months.

The Truth About Grassfed Beef

A lot of people today, horrified by how animals
are treated in factory farms and feedlots, and wanting to lower their
ecological footprint, are looking for healthier alternatives. As a
result, there is a decided trend toward pasture-raised animals. One
former vegetarian, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, says
he now eats meat, but only “grassfed and organic and sustainable as
possible, reverentially and deeply gratefully, and in small amounts.”
Sales of grassfed and organic beef are rising rapidly. Ten years
ago, there were only about 50 grassfed cattle operations left in the
U.S. Now there are thousands.
How much difference does it make? Is grassfed really better? If so, in what ways, and how much?
If you read on, you’ll see why I’ve concluded that grassfed is indeed
better. But then, almost anything would be. Putting beef cattle in
feedlots and feeding them grain may actually be one of the dumbest ideas
in the history of western civilization.
Cattle (like sheep, deer and other grazing animals) are endowed with
the ability to convert grasses, which we humans cannot digest, into
flesh that we are able to digest. They can do this because unlike
humans, who possess only one stomach, they are ruminants, which is to
say that they possess a rumen, a 45 or so gallon fermentation tank in
which resident bacteria convert cellulose into protein and fats.
In today’s feedlots, however, cows fed corn and other grains are
eating food that human can eat, and they are quite inefficiently
converting it into meat. Since it takes anywhere from 7 to 16 pounds of
grain to make a pound of feedlot beef, we actually get far less food
out than we put in. It’s a protein factory in reverse.
And we do this on a massive scale, while nearly a billion people on our planet do not have enough to eat.Feedlot Reality
How has a system that is so wasteful come to be? Feedlots and other
CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) are not the inevitable
product of agricultural progress, nor are they the result of market
forces. They are instead the result of public policies that massively
favor large-scale feedlots to the detriment of family farms.
From 1997 to 2005, for example, taxpayer-subsidized grain prices
saved feedlots and other CAFOs about $35 billion. This subsidy is so
large that it reduced the price CAFOs pay for animal feed to a tiny
fraction of what it would otherwise have been. Cattle operations that
raise animals exclusively on pasture land, however, derive no benefit
from the subsidy.
Federal policies also give CAFOs billions of dollars to address their
pollution problems, which arise because they confine so many animals,
often tens of thousands, in a small area. Small farmers raising cattle
on pasture do not have this problem in the first place. If feedlots and
other CAFOs were required to pay the price of handling the animal waste
in an environmentally health manner, if they were made to pay to
prevent or to clean up the pollution they create, they wouldn’t be
dominating the U.S. meat industry the way they are today. But instead
we have had farm policies that require the taxpayers to foot the bill.
Such policies have made feedlots and other CAFOs feasible, but only by
fleecing the public.
Traditionally, all beef was grassfed beef, but we’ve turned that
completely upside down. Now, thanks to our misguided policies, our beef
supply is almost all feedlot beef.
Thanks to government subsidies, it’s cheaper, and it’s also faster.
Seventy-five years ago, steers were slaughtered at the age of four- or
five-years-old. Today’s steers, however, grow so fast on the grain they
are fed that they can be butchered much younger, typically when they are
only 14 or 16 months.
All beef cattle spend the first few months of their lives on pasture
or rangeland, where they graze on forage crops such as grass or
alfalfa. But then nearly all are fattened, or as the industry likes to
call it “finished,” in feedlots where they eat grain. You can’t take a
beef calf from a birth weight of 80 pounds to 1,200 pounds in a little
more than a year on grass. That kind of unnaturally fast weight gain
takes enormous quantities of corn, soy-based protein supplements,
antibiotics and other drugs, including growth hormones.
Under current farm policies, switching a cow from grass to corn makes
economic sense, but it is still profoundly disturbing to the animal’s
digestive system. It can actually kill a steer if not done gradually
and if the animal is not continually fed antibiotics.
Author (and small-scale cattleman) Michael Pollan describes what
happens to cows when they are taken off of pastures and put into
feedlots and fed corn:
“Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on
corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of
gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when
the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination
all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the
rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s
lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually
by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates.
“A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike our own highly
acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it
unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which
in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick.
Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw
at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea,
ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune
system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to
feedlot polio.”
Putting beef cattle in feedlots and giving them corn is not only
unnatural and dangerous for the cows. It also has profound medical
consequences for us, and this is true whether or not we eat their flesh.
Feedlot beef as we know it today would be impossible if it weren’t for
the routine and continual feeding of antibiotics to these animals. This
leads directly and inexorably to the development of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria. These new “superbugs” are increasingly rendering our
antibiotics ineffective for treating disease in humans.
Further, it is the commercial meat industry’s practice of keeping
cattle in feedlots and feeding them grain that is responsible for the
heightened prevalence of deadly E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria. When cattle
are grainfed, their intestinal tracts become far more acidic, which
favors the growth of pathogenic E. coli bacteria that can kill people
who eat undercooked hamburger.
It’s not widely known, but E. coli 0157:H7 has only recently appeared
on the scene. It was first identified in the 1980s, but now this
pathogen can be found in the intestines of almost all feedlot cattle in
the U.S. Even less widely recognized is that the practice of feeding
corn and other grains to cattle has created the perfect conditions for
forms of E. Coli and other microbes to come into being that can, and do,
kill us.
Prior to the advent of feedlots, the microbes that resided in the
intestines of cows were adapted to a neutral-pH environment. As a
result, if they got into meat, it didn’t usually cause much of a problem
because the microbes perished in the acidic environment of the human
stomach. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot animal has
changed. It is now nearly as acidic as our own. In this new, manmade
environment, strains of E. coli and other pathogens have developed that
can survive our stomach acids, and go on to kill us. As Michael Pollan
puts it, “by acidifying a cow’s gut with corn, we have broken down one
of our food chain’s barriers to infections.”Which is more nutritious?
Many of us think of “corn-fed” beef as nutritionally superior, but it
isn’t. A cornfed cow does develop well-marbled flesh, but this is
simply saturated fat that can’t be trimmed off. Grassfed meat, on the
other hand, is lower both in overall fat and in artery-clogging
saturated fat. A sirloin steak from a grainfed feedlot steer has more
than double the total fat of a similar cut from a grassfed steer. In its
less-than-infinite wisdom, however, the USDA continues to grade beef in
a way that rewards marbling with intra-muscular fat.
Grassfed beef not only is lower in overall fat and in saturated fat,
but it has the added advantage of providing more omega-3 fats. These
crucial healthy fats are most plentiful in flaxseeds and fish, and are
also found in walnuts, soybeans and in meat from animals that have
grazed on omega-3 rich grass. When cattle are taken off grass, though,
and shipped to a feedlot to be fattened on grain, they immediately begin
losing the omega-3s they have stored in their tissues. A grassfed
steak typically has about twice as many omega-3s as a grainfed steak.
In addition to being higher in healthy omega-3s, meat from pastured
cattle is also up to four times higher in vitamin E than meat from
feedlot cattle, and much higher in conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a
nutrient associated with lower cancer risk.What about taste?
The higher omega-3 levels and other differences in fatty acid
composition are certainly a nutritional advantage for grassfed beef, but
come with a culinary cost. These differences contribute to flavors and
odors in grassfed meat that some people find undesirable. Taste-panel
participants have found the meat from grassfed animals to be
characterized by “off-flavors including ammonia, gamey, bitter,
liverish, old, rotten and sour.”
Even the people who market grassfed beef say this is true. Joshua
Appleton, the owner of Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in
Kingston, New York, says “Grassfed beef has a hard flavor profile for a
country that’s been raised on corn-fed beef.”
Unlike cows in a feedlot, animals on a pasture move around. This
exercise creates muscle tone, and the resulting beef can taste a little
chewier than many people prefer. Grassfed beef doesn’t provide the
“melt-in-your-mouth” sensation that the modern meat eater has come to
prefer.What about the environment?
As well as its nutritional advantages, there are also environmental
benefits to grassfed beef. According to David Pimentel, a Cornell
ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, the corn we feed
our feedlot cattle accounts for a staggering amount of fossil fuel
energy. Growing the corn used to feed livestock takes vast quantities of
chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil.
Because of this dependence on petroleum, Pimentel says, a typical steer
will in effect consume 284 gallons of oil in his lifetime. Comments
Michael Pollan,
“We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming
what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need:
another fossil-fuel machine.”
In addition to consuming less energy, grassfed beef has another
environmental advantage — it is far less polluting. The animals’ wastes
drop onto the land, becoming nutrients for the next cycle of crops. In
feedlots and other forms of factory farming, however, the animals’
wastes build up in enormous quantities, becoming a staggering source of
water and air pollution.Less misery on the menu?
From a humanitarian perspective, there is yet another advantage to
pastured animal products. The animals themselves are not forced to live
in confinement. The cruelties of modern factory farming are so severe
that you don’t have to be a vegetarian or an animal rights activist to
find the conditions to be intolerable, and a violation of the
human-animal bond. Pastured livestock are not forced to endure the
miseries of factory farming. They are not cooped up in cages barely
larger than their own bodies, or packed together like sardines for
months on end standing knee deep in their own manure.Grassfed or organic?
It’s important to remember that organic is not the same as grassfed.
Natural food stores often sell organic beef and dairy products that are
hormone- and antibiotic- free. These products come from animals who
were fed organically grown grain, but who typically still spent most of
their lives (or in the case of dairy cows perhaps their whole lives) in
feedlots. The sad reality is that almost all the organic beef and
organic dairy products sold in the U.S. today comes from feedlots.
Just as organic does not mean grass-fed, grass-fed does not mean
organic. Pastured animals sometimes graze on land that has been treated
with synthetic fertilizers and even doused with herbicides. Unless the
meat label specifically says it is both grassfed and organic, it isn’t.
And then, as seems so often to be the case, there is greenwashing. A
case in point is the “premium natural” beef raised by the enormous
Harris Ranch, located in Fresno County, California. Harris Ranch
“premium natural” beef is sold in health food stores west of the
Rockies. The company says it is “at the forefront of quality, safety
and consumer confidence” with its “premium natural beef.”
But even Harris Ranch spokesman Brad Caudill admits that under
current USDA rules, the term “natural” is meaningless. Harris Ranch
cattle are fattened in a 100,000 cattle feedlot in California’s Central
Valley. And the feed is not organically grown. The only difference
between Harris Ranch “premium natural” beef and the typical feedlot
product is that the animals are raised without growth hormones or
supplemental antibiotics added to their feed. Despite the marketing and
hype, the product is neither organic nor grassfed. (Harris Ranch also
sells a line of organic beef, but the cattle are still raised in
over-crowded and filthy feedlots. There can be as many as 100 cattle,
weighing from 700 to 1,200 pounds, living in a pen the size of a
basketball court.)Is grassfed beef the answer?
Grass-fed beef certainly has its advantages, but it is typically more
expensive, and I’m not at all sure that’s a bad thing. We shouldn’t be
eating nearly as much meat as we do.
There is a dark side even to grassfed beef. It takes a lot of
grassland to raise a grassfed steer. Western rangelands are vast, but
not nearly vast enough to sustain America’s 100 million head of cattle.
There is no way that grassfed beef can begin to feed the current meat
appetites of people in the United States, much less play a role in
addressing world hunger. Grassfed meat production might be viable in a
country like New Zealand with its geographic isolation, unique climate
and topography, and exceedingly small human population. But in a world
of 7 billion people, I am afraid that grassfed beef is a food that only
the wealthy elites will be able to consume in any significant
quantities.
What would happen if we sought to raise great quantities of grassfed
beef? It’s been tried, in Brazil, and the result has been an
environmental nightmare of epic proportions. In 2009, Greenpeace
released a report titled “Slaughtering the Amazon,” which presented
detailed satellite photos showing that Amazon cattle are now the biggest
single cause of global deforestation, which is in turn responsible for
20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. Even Brazil’s government,
whose policies have made the nation the world’s largest beef exporter,
and home to the planet’s largest commercial cattle herd, acknowledges
that cattle ranching is responsible for 80 percent of Amazonian
deforestation. Much of the remaining 20 percent is for land to grow
soy, which is not used to make tofu. It is sold to China to feed
livestock.
Amazonian cattle are free-range, grassfed, and possibly organic, but
they are still a plague on the planet and a driving force behind global
warming.
Trendy consumers like to think that grassfed beef is green and
earth-friendly and does not have environmental problems comparable to
factory farmed beef. But grassfed and feedlot beef production both
contribute heavily to global climate change. They do this through
emissions of two potent global warming gases: methane and nitrous
oxide.
Next to carbon dioxide, the most destabilizing gas to the planet’s
climate is methane. Methane is actually 24 times more potent a
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and its concentration in the
atmosphere is rising even faster. The primary reason that concentrations
of atmospheric methane are now triple what they were when they began
rising a century ago is beef production. Cattle raised on pasture
actually produce more methane than feedlot animals, on a per-cow basis.
The slower weight gain of a grassfed animal means that each cow
produces methane emissions for a longer time.
Meanwhile, producing a pound of grassfed beef accounts for every bit
as much nitrous oxide emissions as producing a pound of feedlot beef,
and sometimes, due to the slower weight gain, even more. These
emissions are not only fueling global warming. They are also acidifying
soils, reducing biodiversity, and shrinking Earth’s protective
stratospheric ozone layer.
The sobering reality is that cattle grazing in the U.S. is already
taking a tremendous toll on the environment. Even with almost all U.S.
beef cattle spending much of their lives in feedlots, seventy percent of
the land area of the American West is currently used for grazing
livestock. More than two-thirds of the entire land area of Montana,
Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Idaho is used
for rangeland. In the American West, virtually every place that can be
grazed, is grazed. The results aren’t pretty. As one environmental
author put it, “Cattle grazing in the West has polluted more water,
eroded more topsoil, killed more fish, displaced more wildlife, and
destroyed more vegetation than any other land use.”
Western rangelands have been devastated under the impact of the
current system, in which cattle typically spend only six months or so on
the range, and the rest of their lives in feedlots. To bring cows to
market weight on rangeland alone would require each animal to spend not
six months foraging, but several years, greatly multiplying the damage
to western ecosystems.
The USDA’s taxpayer-funded Animal Damage Control (ADC) program was
established in 1931 for a single purpose—to eradicate, suppress, and
control wildlife considered to be detrimental to the western livestock
industry. The program has not been popular with its opponents. They have
called the ADC by a variety of names, including, “All the Dead
Critters” and “Aid to Dependent Cowboys.”
In 1997, following the advice of public relations and image
consultants, the federal government gave a new name to the ADC—“Wildlife
Services.” And they came up with a new motto—“Living with Wildlife.”
But the agency does not exactly “live with” wildlife. What it
actually does is kill any creature that might compete with or threaten
livestock. Its methods include poisoning, trapping, snaring, denning,
shooting, and aerial gunning. In “denning” wildlife, government agents
pour kerosene into the den and then set it on fire, burning the young
alive in their nests.
Among the animals Wildlife Services agents intentionally kill are
badgers, black bears, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain
lions, opossum, raccoons, striped skunks, beavers, nutrias, porcupines,
prairie dogs, black birds, cattle egrets, and starlings. Animals
unintentionally killed by Wildlife Services agents include domestic dogs
and cats, and several threatened and endangered species.
All told, Wildlife Services intentionally kills more than 1.5 million
wild animals annually. This is done at public expense, to protect the
private financial interests of ranchers who graze their livestock on
public lands, and who pay almost nothing for the privilege.
The price that western lands and wildlife are paying for grazing
cattle is hard to exaggerate. Conscientious management of rangelands can
certainly reduce the damage, but widespread production of grassfed beef
would only multiply this already devastating toll.
“Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest,
are what you might call ‘cow burnt.’ Almost anywhere and everywhere you
go in the American West you find hordes of cows. . . . They are a pest
and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They
infest our canyons, valleys, meadows and forests. They graze off the
native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of
prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti.
They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested
wheat grass. Even when the cattle are not physically present, you see
the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general
destruction. If you don’t see it, you’ll smell it. The whole American
West stinks of cattle.” — Edward Abbey, conservationist and author, in a
speech before cattlemen at the University of Montana in 1985Not the Stiffest Competition
Grassfed beef is certainly much healthier than feedlot beef for the
consumer, and may be slightly healthier for the environment. But doing
well in such a comparison hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement.
While grassfed beef and other pastured animal products have advantages
over factory farm and feedlot products, it’s important to remember that
factory farm and feedlot products are an unmitigated disaster. Almost
anything would be an improvement.
I am reminded of a brochure the Cattlemen’s Association used to
distribute to schools. The pamphlet compared the nutritional realities
of a hamburger to another common food, and made much of the fact that
the hamburger was superior in that it had more of every single nutrient
listed than did its competitor. And what’s more, the competitor had far
more sugar. The comparison made it sound like a hamburger was truly a
health food.
The competition, however, was not the stiffest imaginable. It was a 12-ounce can of Coke.
Comparing grassfed beef to feedlot beef is a little like that. It’s
far healthier, far more humane, and somewhat more environmentally
sustainable, at least on a modest scale. Overall, it’s indeed better.
If you are going to eat meat, dairy products or eggs, then that’s the
best way to do it.
But I wouldn’t get too carried away and think that as long as it’s
grassfed then it’s fine and dandy. Grassfed products are still high in
saturated fat (though not as high), still high in cholesterol, and are
still devoid of fiber and many other essential nutrients. They are still
high on the food chain, and so often contain elevated concentrations of
environmental toxins.Imagine
While grassfed beef has advantages over feedlot beef, another answer
is to eat less meat, or even none. If as a society we ate less, the
world would indeed be a brighter and more beautiful place. Consider,
for example, the impact on global warming. Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist
at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of
geophysics at the University of Chicago, have calculated the benefits
that would occur if Americans were to reduce beef consumption by 20
percent. Such a change would decrease our greenhouse gas emissions as
substantially as if we exchanged all our cars and trucks for Priuses.
If we ate less meat, the vast majority of the public lands in the
western United States could be put to more valuable — and
environmentally sustainable — use. Much of the western United States is
sunny and windy, and could be used for large-scale solar energy and
wind-power facilities. With the cattle off the land, photovoltaic
modules and windmills could generate enormous amounts of energy without
polluting or causing environmental damage. Other areas could grow
grasses that could be harvested as “biomass” fuels, providing a far less
polluting source of energy than fossil fuels. Much of it could be
restored, once again becoming valued wildlife habitat. The restoration
of cow burnt lands would help to vitalize rural economies as well as
ecosystems.
And there is one more thing. When you picture grassfed beef, you
probably envision an idyllic scene of a cow outside in a pasture
munching happily on grass. That is certainly the image those endorsing
and selling these products would like you to hold. And there is some
truth to it.
But it is only a part of the story. There is something missing from
such a pleasant picture, something that nevertheless remains an
ineluctable part of the actual reality. Grassfed beef does not just come
to you straight from God’s Green Earth. It also comes to you via the
slaughterhouse.
The lives of grassfed livestock are more humane and natural than the
lives of animals confined in factory farms and feedlots, but their
deaths are often just as terrifying and cruel. If they are taken to a
conventional slaughterhouse, as indeed most of them are, they are just
as likely as a feedlot animal to be skinned while alive and fully
conscious, and just as apt to be butchered and have their feet cut off
while they are still breathing — distressing realities that tragically
occur every hour in meat-packing plants nationwide. Confronting the
brutal realities of modern slaughterhouses can be a harsh reminder that
those who contemplate only the pastoral image of cattle patiently
foraging do not see the whole picture.

About Me

I've done little planning, but been extraordinarily lucky. New opportunities seem to appear when I got bored, or my boss got tired of me. After teaching at high school and university, and market gardening when I went "back to the land", I spent 30 years working for the CBC, most of it when CBC had the resources to do things that mattered, not the media sweatshop its become now. Again, I was the lucky one.